The Viva Piñata gameplay experience presents a customizable, social and spontaneous world in which gamers play an absolutely crucial role. It is not just a garden, it is an evolving paradise teeming with fantastic living piñata creatures and vibrant plant life, all determined by the player's choices and actions.

Game Specifics

Viva Piñata feels like being given the opportunity to create the world you’ve always wanted to have. It’s about creativity, customisation, freedom of expression and personalising the world around you to attract these piñatas into your garden.

The garden starts out as a dirty brown landscape and you have to go about transforming it from a very basic level. As you start turning that brown patch into a garden by using your garden tools, you’ll attract piñatas who will help develop your land and, in turn, attract other piñatas. There’s a whole food chain of piñatas and each one depends on another, so as your garden grows you see a real evolutionary process. Another aspect of Viva Pinata is sickness. If a pinata gets sick you can either ignore it or try to heal it. If a pinata gets too sick to heal itself, it will leave your garden and return to the wild.

Manipulating/Interacting with your Piñatas

By selecting a piñata and then clicking on another piñata you can get them to interact with each other. But be warned: they’re all very temperamental and spontaneous so they’re not always going to do what you want them to do. For instance, you could tell a horse character to go somewhere else in the garden but he may be happy where he is and refuse to go. Or two different species of piñatas may fall out with each other if you keep them too close together.

The worms are basic piñatas. They’re very obedient. Tell them to go somewhere or do something and they’ll do it. The more advanced the piñata, the more likely they are to do things you don’t expect. But a lot of the fun is just getting your garden to the stage where you can sit back and let the animals go about their business.

In game you have a cursor very similar to what you have in "The Sims", as in you have a circular area you can move around and click on things to select or interact with them.